Its because hes John Lucas. Kind of like Kwaad has a massive fanbase.

Three things for Nintendo if the Wii gets anywhere near 240,000,000 in sales

1) You can kiss that little 3000 employee count goodbye.

2) I am scared to think what the DS's sales would be.

3) Most probably no more playstations (but that's a whole subject in itself)

I think John Lucas is being disingenuous or simply asinine.

He's claiming that the Wii will hit 60 million nearly TWICE AS FAST as one of the most successful home consoles ever, the ps2.

 Number of people isn't the important statistic when considering market size for electronics. The relevent statistic is number of households.

 Actually, if you'd look at the numbers, the Wii will reach 18.5 by 12:01AM on January 1, 2008. WILL. As in, there's absolutely no doubt about it. No matter what, it will reach that.

 So 20m isn't that unreasonable at all. 22m is even within possible reach (although not very reasonable).

As others have said, Nintendo isn't the type of company to make the kind of 110% commitment that would get them even CLOSE to producing 40 million additional Wiis in 2008. The company won't take unnecessary risks, and throwing the whole company off-balance to push it from 45-50 million LTD in 2008 up to 60+ million is an unnecessary risk.

Some have said that this conservatism is a fault of Nintendo's, but I couldn't disagree more. It isn't afraid of innovation -- look at the DS! -- and its games consistently raise the bar for the entire industry. Certainly, it can fall behind the curve sometimes (see: online) but overall I think its particular business philosophy is part of what has kept Nintendo in an industry-leading position for over two decades.

Johns 20M prediction; it still is possible, and note withoud the delayed production increase, Wii would easilly have hit the 20M. Also worth noticing would be, that in traditional way, how supply is diverted, Wii would have outsold 360 in NA, like John predicted, but Europe got supplied pretty good.
The 60M seems a little too high and i would go max. 50M. But, Wii will be launched in China, and Avinash gave good estimation of potential market size of China and India combined, so Chinese market (potential) equals the US market by size. Nintendo isn't going to China blindfolded, they have made plans for China, believe me.
So, Johns 60M prediction depends highly on chinese demand.

There's also one thing happening in world politics, western countries are demanding China to do something about piracy, it of course won't end it, but if China does something to it, it will have effect.

Wii has huge potential, and it may very well sell lifetime what John predicts.

@Lost tears of kain: Guess how many times John has been shot down. The reason why people are so interested in "Krazy Johns" predictions, is because his predictions seem to be pretty close, and that makes people to think he's even more crazy.

And who were talking about GTA being "HC" targeted game? It is similar series with Super Mario, it appeals to casuals as well as "HC" group, actually you can play them in similar ways. One of the reasons why it's considered so violent, is because of the "casual" way to play it, when you don't play missions, but instead you just steal cars and kill people. And as a "mature" IP, kids are very interested in it.

I'm saying 50m. Even that will be a challenge - going from 17m (in a fiscal year) to 30m - is anything but trivial (that comes to 2.5m/month).

Predicting Ninty will forecast 25m for next fiscal year - leaving a little room to up it a couple of times over.

Quick predictions (March '09)
Wii: 50m
360: 25m
PS3: 20m